Digging the Orkney Story

The paper presents what a range of Old Norse-Icelandic sagas and other texts have to say about the beginnings of Orkney and Shetland in the Viking Age in an attempt to sift these various textual perspectives and establish how they tell the story of the arrival of Scandinavians in the Northern Isles, a story that is barely alluded to in Orkneyinga saga. The significance of the chronological gap between events and texts will be explored paying particular attention to what is called the «stratigraphy of texts», an approach that explores the potential relationships between texts at different stages, and thereby provides some insights into the source-value of sagas. The paper will also consider some archaeological material in an attempt to explore how this can be brought into dialogue with the relevant texts.